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I am using an 8 inch Zen dome. The Tokina was at 17mm and still the manatee is less than 1/3 of the entire FOV. While sometimes manatees will initiate contact if they choose to stay afar there is no way a diver can close the distance. I was in a designated swimming area at the park and holding on to a rope (there is about a 2 knot current from the spring) that designates the limits of the swimming area.

While I like the idea of maybe using touch up auto paint to designate the 3 and 9 o'clock positions I am not sure every image should be composed with the surface of the water at the 1/2 mark.

I am still wondering about adding a viewfinder to help with composition, something I asked about earlier. Nauticam makes both a 180 and 45 degree viewfinder and I am leaning towards the 45 degree because I think it would help with splits.

Do any of you guys use a viewfinder, and if so what is your impression of the difference between the 180 and 45.

OK, I get the stopping down thing, but I guess my real question was not just about focus and exposure (which could certainly be imporved); but composition as well. I am not sure this is the right term, but the water line seems to be too thick, and I suspect this is the result of the camera being at the wrong level; I am guessing the water line would not be almost hitting the manatee's back, but would show the manatee was really about three feet or so below the surface. While the Nauticam housing seems to be a good one using live view and trying to compose looking at the LCD while holding the camera at arms length is not a skill I have developed yet. In fact I am not sure that is the best way to compose. I have seen a couple of Nauticam viewfinders, the 180 and 45 degree, but again I am not sure if the addition of a viewfinder would help.

Panda's suggestion to dip the camera under water and "shoot a few shots" makes sense in a spray and pray type of shooting, and this is something I use when shooting birds in flight with my 1d4. Now I am wondering if a spray and pray method of just capturing as many images as possible in high speed mode and picking out the best ones would produce more keepers than trying to carefully compose fewer shots.

I am planning to return to Wakulla Springs next week (have a dive at another location planned for the weekend) and will definitely stop down more and see how that works.

My name is Tom. I started SCUBA diving in Miami in 1959. I have used both the Nikonos II and the Nikonos IVA in years past. About six months ago I bought a Canon D10, which is OK for snapshots and compact in size did not provide the image quality I was looking for.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a Nauticam housing for my 7d along with a Zen 8in dome. So far I have only used it in a local fresh water spring and got some images of manatees, one that swam up so close to me I was not able to get its whole body in the FOV using my Tokina 10-17. When I showed the images to some other visitors to the park the most common reply was "wow an underwater camera that does not suck".

I still need to improve my skills as shooting underwater is much different than shooting on the surface. Here is a link to some of my pix on facebook, not all underwater http://www.facebook....1...2145&type=1